Pod Insights Endless Thread Hidden Levels: Choose Your Player (Side Quest) About this episode Today, Stef Sanjati is a creator on YouTube with over half a million subscribers. Her content mostly focuses on her two greatest loves — makeup and gaming — often combining the two with her otherworldly video game-inspired beauty tutorials.
Growing up in small-town Ontario, though, Stef was a quiet, introverted kid who was bullied a lot. For one thing, she looked different from her peers. Having been born with a rare genetic condition called Waardenburg Syndrome, Stef has several distinct physical features, including wide-set blue eyes and a natural streak of white hair.
But there was something else that she didn’t quite have the words for back then – something she felt closest to while playing as her favorite avatar in World of Warcraft, the massively multiplayer online role-playing game by Blizzard Entertainment. That something else was that Stef is trans.
Choosing your player is a near-ubiquitous experience in gaming. Whether it's picking from a stock of ready-made options in Mario Kart or carefully calibrating a custom avatar in World of Warcraft, a gamer's choice of character has a huge impact on the gaming experience. But when a gamer is given the chance to choose, or even build, a brand new identity outside of the one they experience every day, the potential impact goes far beyond simple gameplay.
Credits
This episode was written and produced by Frannie Monahan and edited by Meg Cramer. Mix, sound design and music composition by Paul Vaitkus.
"Hidden Levels" https://99pi.org/hl is a production of 99% Invisible https://99percentinvisible.org and WBUR's Endless Thread https://link.mgln.ai/99percentinvisible. The Managing Producer for Hidden Levels is Chris Berube. The series was created by Ben Brock Johnson. Series theme by Swan Real and Paul Vaitkus. Series art by Aaron Nestor.
Transcript 5,804 words · 14 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. A recent episode explores how AI is reshaping our schools. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode.
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1:12 Speaker 03 WBUR Podcasts, Boston.
1:23 Ben Brock Johnson? Emory, I know you're not a gamer, but from your Hidden Levels episode about the history of the joystick, I do know that you have played Mario Kart.
1:32 Amory Sivertson? I have. I have played Mario Kart once in my life. Did not win by a long shot, but...
1:40 Ben Brock Johnson? Which character did you choose when you started your race?
1:44 Amory Sivertson? I was Ludwig. Does that mean anything to you?
1:47 Ben Brock Johnson? I'm not a, like, modern Mario person, so I, I, like, it's Yoshi, Princess Peach, Toad, Wario, Mario, Luigi, Bowser, Donkey Kong. Like, those are my options. Ludwig, I'm less, I don't know as well. What made you choose Ludwig?
2:08 Amory Sivertson? Honestly, I just loved his flowing blue hair. He has blue hair. I didn't know what he really looked like until later. A much later Google reveals that he's got like a dinosaur body and he has a single tooth. He's got like a Tom Cruise center tooth, pointy center tooth. But it's that blue hair, man.
2:30 Ben Brock Johnson? Well, that flowing blue hair is relevant because this episode, our side quest from Frannie Monahan is a special one to me. Our series is about how video games can change the world beyond video games.
2:46 Amory Sivertson? And when we think about how video games can offer you the opportunity to choose identities that are different than the one you're experiencing every day, you can imagine some possibilities that go way past picking Ludwig because of blue hair.
3:01 Ben Brock Johnson? Here's Frannie's episode, Choose Your Player.
3:17 Speaker 06 Hello, little buns. Hello, everybody. Hello, whoever you are. Thank you for joining me on my YouTube channel. My name is Steph Saniani. I am a former makeup artist.
3:26 Speaker 07 Steph Saniani is a content creator on YouTube, a transgender advocate, a makeup artist, but beyond all else...
3:33 Speaker 06 I'm a hardcore gamer and I'm a big fan of World of Warcraft. And I am here today to bring you a World of Warcraft War Within inspired makeup look. Of course, inspired by the new expansion that's coming out in a couple of days. It's already in early access. I am a 20-year-old.
3:47 Speaker 07 Most of Steph's makeup content is super influenced by various video games. Sparkly and colorful Pokemon-inspired looks to dark and smoky ones from the Witcher game series. Today's tutorial is for a bright metallic orange and purple style, inspired by the game that changed her life: World of Warcraft.
4:08 Speaker 06 And while we blend, let me tell you why I love World of Warcraft. I have been playing World of Warcraft since I was nine years old. I'm 29 in November, so it's been 20 frickin' years. It's the 20th anniversary of the game.
4:22 Speaker 07 For anyone who hasn't played World of Warcraft, or WoW for short, the game is set on the fictional planet of Azeroth, a fantasy world filled with mythical beings and magical quests.
4:34 Speaker 06 I originally got into World of Warcraft because my brother was into World of Warcraft, and I loved my brother, and I wanted to always be around him and do the things that he was doing.
4:42 Speaker 07 When Steph followed her brother into the world of Azeroth, she got to leave behind the small, conservative town in Ontario where she grew up.
4:50 Speaker 06 When I was like 9, 10, 11, I was going through a lot of bullying at school. The thing that I struggled with was, even prior to knowing I was queer, I was born with a genetic mutation called Waardenburg Syndrome.
5:02 Speaker 07 Waardenburg Syndrome has a few distinct physical characteristics. For example, Steph has wide-set eyes that are this bright blue color. Ever since she was a little kid, Steph has also had a natural streak of white hair at her forehead. She's also deaf in her left ear, which is another symptom of Waardenburg.
5:20 Speaker 06 So even from a very young age, it wasn't physically possible for me to blend in with my peers. And being able to, in a digital world, have a choice about how I showed up and how I appeared was extremely powerful at a time when I resented the way that I looked for so many reasons.
5:42 Speaker 07 In Azeroth, you can be whoever or whatever you want: orc, dwarf, elf, human, gnome, et cetera. In the game, these are called races. There's currently 25 to choose from. You also choose a gender, male or female, and you can customize your character's appearance however you want: hair, facial features, skin color, clothes. The character at the center of Steph's story, she created when she was 11 years old, about a decade before her transition, a beautiful, male blood elf she called Lays, because she was eating Lays chips at the time.
6:20 Speaker 06 I remember choosing the blood elf specifically because they were so beautiful. And often, at that time period in the world of Warcraft and in the culture around the game, there was a lot of jokes made about how blood elf men are mistaken for women by other people in the world, or that they're actually, they're too feminine. It felt more in line with who I was than all of the other extremely... Very buff and very muscular male sort of archetypes that you could choose from.
6:49 Speaker 08 The Blood Elves, following the will of their crazed leader, Kael'fa Sunstrider, channeled dangerous, chaotic magics to transform-
6:57 Speaker 07 Blood Elves are a tall, slender, and elegant subclass of elf with glowing green eyes. They were added as a playable option in the 2007 expansion of World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade.
7:09 Speaker 08 As one of the remaining Blood Elves, you must fight to protect Quel'Thalas and help redeem the soul of your ancient people.
7:18 Speaker 07 Steph still remembers the morning Burning Crusade dropped. As she describes it, "Expansion drop day is basically Christmas for nerds." Her dad waited outside of Walmart before opening to score not one, but two collector's editions of the expansion for her and her brother.
7:34 Speaker 06 There was supposed to be a rule that it was one per person, but he said, "Look, both of my kids really want this. Please let me have two of these." And they did. And then he got home and they let us stay home from school and play through that very special first day of the expansion, which is huge.
7:49 Speaker 07 When Burning Crusade came out, Steph's brother, Tony, also created a male Blood Elf character.
7:55 Speaker 09 The community had a sort of understanding of them as a bit, maybe not queer-coded, but there was definitely a bit of a disdain for them amongst people who didn't play them. When I first played a Blood Elf male, I was a little insecure about it, probably. You know, I was kind of like, "Yeah, you know, well, these guys are the only ones that could be Paladin's and I'm not, you know, I don't really play it because I like being a Blood Elf or whatever." But I did like being a Blood Elf, and I'll admit that.
8:22 Speaker 07 A Paladin is a kind of holy knight or warrior. It's a class of character within World of Warcraft. After picking your race, you also get to pick a class, which is basically like your fantasy job. Some other options include Demon Hunter, Monk, Warlock. Blaise the Blood Elf, Steph's character, was a rogue, a kind of super stealthy assassin, ideal for sneaking around unseen.
8:46 Speaker 06 My choice of the Rogue for my Blood Elf character was very specifically, at that time, I wanted to- Not be receiving attention that I didn't want.
8:58 Speaker 09 At school, I know she was bullied quite a bit for being, you know, a bit more effeminate. Trans people just weren't very visible at the time. She didn't fit in very well. But when we got on World of Warcraft, you know, you are your character and you can go out and, you know, sort of express yourself how you want to.
9:20 Speaker 07 Again, Steph hadn't realized that she was trans yet. Back then, she didn't even know there was a word for how she felt.
9:27 Speaker 06 I had no idea what trans people were, but I know the earliest that I could understand was, based on the knowledge I had, was that I was gay. And I think I figured that out around 11 years old, around the same time I started playing the Blood Elf Rogue.
9:41 Speaker 07 And if you can remember the early 2000s, being a queer kid during that time sucked.
9:47 Speaker 06 The earliest I actually heard about gay, you know, was with slurs and insults. So my introduction to the world of queerness and to what queer people were was, you know, hate speech, slurs, personal attacks, and also Jerry Springer with, you know, that was not good trans representation. So my experience with queer identity for the first several years of being aware of it were very frightening and very traumatic.
10:17 Speaker 07 But in an online game, no one really needs to know who you are or what you look like in real life. And if you happen to meet a jerk, you can just block them. So in Azeroth, playing as Lays, Steph was free to be herself.
10:30 Speaker 06 My mom and my brother specifically were asking, like, why do you spend so much time with this game? Why is it so important that you play this character? And I said, because I get to be beautiful. I always remember the way that I felt when I said that because it was the most honest thing I'd ever said as a kid. It was just, I felt my heart like ripping when I said it. It wasn't about a peak physical beauty that I wanted. I just wanted to feel good about myself. I wanted to feel at home in my body. And I only really felt that way when I saw myself through the lens of this Blood Elf, this feminine character. And interestingly, over the course of the following years, I started taking steps to reflect that in the real world.
11:17 Speaker 07 Steph says she was forcibly outed as gay in high school, which made most things a lot harder. But there was also no reason to hide it so much anymore.
11:28 Speaker 06 I decided I'm just going to lean into myself because they're going to, they're going to treat me horribly one way or another, right? So I started presenting extremely femme. I wore the clothes that I wanted. I did my makeup every day. I practiced with makeup constantly. And, you know, in a similar vein to my dad going out and getting those collector's editions, he actually built in my closet a beauty studio for me, which I remember with so much like that, I feel so grateful that he was so supportive of me. Because a lot of queer kids did not have that.
11:55 Speaker 07 Tony remembers the hostility his sister faced in their hometown, especially as Steph began expressing her femininity more outwardly.
12:03 Speaker 09 I know there were some parents who just refused to let their children talk to Steph anymore, things like that. There was one time that my mother's car was vandalized with slurs and things like that. So there was definitely, it brought a lot of negative attention on her locally.
12:26 Speaker 06 When I was afraid, walking down the school hallway, because I faced violence and harassment every single day without fail. I discovered this in therapy many years later, but I would kind of conjure this Blood Elf rogue character for myself.
12:38 Speaker 07 The Blood Elf was quick and evasive and could even turn invisible. Steph started darting swiftly between classes as a way to avoid too much unwanted attention.
12:49 Speaker 06 And I did that every day at school.
12:51 Speaker 07 The day after Steph graduated, she moved out of her small town to Toronto. She got a job working at the makeup counter at Shoppers Drug Mart, Canada's largest pharmacy chain, and started vlogging about her life, makeup, and of course, gaming. Around this time, something happened that caused Steph to really begin questioning her own gender identity. She met a woman named Christine.
13:15 Speaker 06 The first time she came in, she was presenting male. And she was asking for help with a full-coverage foundation. So I thought that she was a drag queen. And so I asked her, like, oh, is this for like a drag thing? And she said, something like that. But the next time she came in, she came in presenting femme. And she had a wig and she had her makeup done. And she asked me for help with her makeup. And it was that moment that I understood, okay, this is not drag. This is like, she, this is her. And I felt...
13:45 Speaker 06 This empathy that it felt bigger than empathy that I'd felt before it. But it was only through being in her presence and hearing her talk about her own experience that I realized, okay, this is my experience. Like, I feel this. What does that mean for me? Is this what I want to do? Is this who I am? And the answer just kept coming back, yes. And I was really nervous, but I did it anyway. Because I knew that to me, it was like, there's, there's no choice here. It's I do this, or I die knowing I didn't. Hi, everybody. I had a plan for this video, and it was very intricate, and it was very artistic. And what ended up happening was I just kept on reading and reading what I wrote.
14:28 Speaker 06 And I felt it was just going to distract from what I wanted to actually say. I've come to understand that I am transgender. I've come to understand that I've always been uncomfortable with my maleness, not my masculinity. And now that I see it that way, the rest of my life makes so much sense. My child. Hi, everybody. I'm back. It's been just about two weeks on my T-blockers, and I have a little bit of updates for you. Nothing major. I started documenting my transition on YouTube shortly after. And then my career kind of took off in tandem with my transition from that point. It has been two months since I started my estrogen pills, so I have a lot of updates to bring you. It has been nine whole months on estrogen. That's like an entire baby. That's an entire fetus development term.
15:12 Speaker 06 Hello, little buns. It is Steph. Welcome to my hotel room. I am in Boston right now. I'm having my facial feminization surgery in two days on. But all the while, I was still returning to Azeroth and playing World of Warcraft.
15:24 Speaker 07 By now, Steph stopped playing as Lays, a character she had spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours with since her childhood. After all, Lays was a man, and that's not who Steph was. Before 2020, there was a paid feature in World of Warcraft where you could change a character's gender. It was only 15 bucks, but something kept Steph from taking that step.
15:46 Speaker 06 I guess, again, it was this apprehension, like, do I make this choice?
15:50 Speaker 07 So Steph made new characters, ones that explored different parts of her femininity.
15:55 Speaker 06 I played a Blood Elf Paladin named Akania. I played her, and I role-played her, I guess, in a way that was different from my Rogue, where she was very, hmm.
16:05 Speaker 06 Brienne of Tarth, sturdy, very walking into danger headstrong, like very confident. I would embody a certain feeling when I played the character, right? And for me, that Blood Elf Paladin was always very self-assured and ready and capable. And it was a different feeling. So that's what I played a lot of during that time. I also played a Night Elf warrior woman, very Amazonian, very like feminine rage. It was a different expression of where I was at was I wanted to feel this feminine strength and confidence and I wanted to feel secure in my body and in my mind and I wanted to feel confident and safe, right? And so I played characters that made me feel that way.
16:53 Speaker 07 Steph's online empire grew to well over half a million subscribers on YouTube. She kept posting makeup and gaming videos. She vlogged through her facial feminization surgery. She also started an in-game club or guild within World of Warcraft called the Bread Squad, which was made up of her growing fanbase. Steph's brother, Tony, joined in too, leading raids for the guild. For several years, Steph's original Blood Elf, Lys, remained in suspended animation until finally she was ready to take the leap.
17:25 Speaker 06 And that was around the time that my transition was really kicking into gear. So I was like, okay, this is working. This is correct. I feel good about this. Let me make this this heart character, this soul character, like this original reflection of myself. I want her to reflect me again.
17:39 Speaker 07 Steph changed her character's gender. Lys became Lyrin. Steph's story of discovering herself through video game avatars is just one of many, especially within the trans community.
17:52 Speaker 06 I've had conversations with other trans people about the whole, oh yeah, I played a female character in a fighting game when I was a kid because it made me feel, you know, more represented and like definitely the experience of using video games as a vehicle for the exploration of gender is very much a thing. It's very consistent. It is not unique to me.
18:19 Speaker 10 I am Sheen Rivera. I am a psychiatrist and psychoanalytic therapist located in Columbia, South Carolina. And my pronouns are they/them.
18:28 Speaker 07 Dr. Rivera works primarily with LGBTQ youth and young adults using virtual spaces, like video games.
18:36 Speaker 10 It's an inevitability, almost an inevitability, for anyone doing clinical work with LGBTQ youth, that they are going to encounter video games being a part of their lives. And that recent surveys have shown through GLAD that nearly one in every three players between the ages of 13 and 17 identifies LGBTQ.
18:59 Speaker 07 Dr. Rivera started noticing the therapeutic benefits that gaming, and specifically, game avatars can have, when a client of theirs brought up the life simulation game, The Sims.
19:10 Speaker 10 She was creating this avatar that became another version of her, that she was able to finally, finally, play with different types of style of clothing and haircuts and makeup, and not be afraid that this was something that was going to be discovered or found out or used to clock her and therefore make her a victim of violence. Little by little, she herself started to try out different things that her avatar did, different types of makeup, different types of clothing, until she settled into this
19:49 Speaker 10 style that was much more her, rather than a preconceived notion of masculinity or femininity. And as that happened, she felt more like herself.
20:02 Speaker 07 There's a famous 20th century psychoanalyst and pediatrician named Donald Wood Winnicott. He believed that play in and of itself was a form of therapy. He said that "it is in playing, and only in playing, that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self."
20:28 Speaker 07 Basically, through playing, we're able to access the truest version of ourselves. To Dr. Rivera, there was a clear connection between the experiences of their clients and Winnicott's theories.
20:39 Speaker 10 His theory here is that a part of us becomes annihilated and lost when we are threatened and can't fully play and discover our true selves.
20:53 Speaker 07 So, playing with something like gender norms can't really happen if you don't feel safe to express yourself. Unfortunately, that's an experience shared by a lot of people in the LGBTQ community.
21:05 Speaker 10 Play can't really happen under threat of violence. So when we think of the young child for whom it is really hammered in very early on that any kind of gender non-conformity, for example, is going to be met with punishment, that if a boy doesn't act like a boy or a girl doesn't act like a girl, and whatever those behaviors entail, that that will be rebuked. Where else can they truly think about the various roles that they might occupy or the possibilities of who they might be and who they are? The virtual space allows for an element and a cushion of safety to explore that.
21:57 Speaker 07 Winnicott also recognized the importance of certain items outside of ourselves that he called "transitional objects." Transitional objects are important developmentally because not only do they provide comfort and emotional security, they also help a child to distinguish between me and not me. Think a little kid's favorite blankie or stuffed animal, something that she might drag around everywhere that helps her feel safe but that she also knows is different from her. Dr. Rivera thinks that we use video game avatars in a similar way.
22:31 Speaker 10 We kind of have to have transitional objects to be our playthings, that these are these other things that are not us but have the capacity to carry aspects of us that we want to explore. So, I might make an avatar using character customization, for example, to make something more like me. But when I'm doing that, I might be doing any number of things. I might actually be making it who I want to be. Or maybe I'm making it who I think other people want me to be. Uh, or maybe I'm making this into a, well, wouldn't it be interesting if this was me? Or funny or humorous, what have you.
23:16 Speaker 10 Uh, in this way that really triggers the imagination to be fully exercised.
23:25 Speaker 07 Dr. Rivera says that as a kid, they also played out these theories through video games.
23:31 Speaker 10 I used to play Super Smash Brothers competitively. Uh, and when Super Smash Brothers Melee came out, Zelda and Sheik appeared as a character. And I was instantly drawn to them.
23:46 Speaker 07 Zelda, as in from The Legend of Zelda, the iconic Nintendo video game franchise that is widely considered one of the best gaming series of all time, which I, Frannie Monahan, would personally have to agree with. Anyway, for the uninitiated, Princess Zelda is not, in fact, the protagonist of these games. She usually plays the part of the damsel in distress, whom the game's hero, Link, must rescue. But true fans will know that there is a lot more to Zelda than that. She often aids Link throughout his various adventures. For instance, in the 1998 game Ocarina of Time, spoiler alert here, Zelda disguises herself as Sheik,
24:30 Speaker 07 who appears to be a mysterious boy who coaches Link through much of the game. In earlier versions of Super Smash Brothers, the Nintendo Cinematic Universe battle game, players could switch back and forth between Zelda and Sheik forms during a match. Later, Sheik became a separate playable character.
24:50 Speaker 06 For me, it was really important that I always played equally as Sheik and transform back into Princess Zelda during these matches. When I connect it now into my current experience of myself and my gender, as somebody who is trans feminine and non-binary, I very much see myself in a state of flux and transformation. That I see these parts of the feminine specifically as being much more important to who I am and how I express myself. And that it turns out, I knew that all along as a child and I was playing that out in the game was something that took me by surprise.
25:41 Speaker 07 Steph, our World of Warcraft gamer and the hero of this story, says that her relationship to her avatars and what they do for her sense of self has evolved over time.
25:52 Speaker 06 Being able to say, "Well, I want to feel beautiful." Or, "I want to feel strong." Or, "I want to be perceived in this way or that way." That was important to me then. And nowadays, it's important to me to represent myself as close to reality as possible, actually. Like, I look for characters or ways that I can express Waardenburg Syndrome on my digital avatars. Or to have my white hair variation or my wide-set eyes. I look for ways to do that.
26:17 Speaker 07 In the last few years, Steph has left her stealthing rogue days behind and has stepped into a new light. She primarily plays as a priest now, a healing character, which she told me just feels right.
26:32 Speaker 06 I may not be choosing characters based on my gender identity, but certainly embodying the priest and being a raid leader and all of these things, there is an identity that I'm connecting with as a leader, as a healer, as a guide. You know, this is where I'm at in my life and I'm making choices in the game that reflect that and also nurture it. It's not just like, "I feel this in reality, so I make it happen in the game." It's a relationship, it's a dynamic between the real world and the digital one, where there's an exchange and the identity grows as a result of that.
27:04 Speaker 07 Gender and gaming is a historically fraught relationship. There are still pockets of the gaming community that are very associated with exclusion. I mean, what does a stereotypical gamer, according to popular media, look like? Probably not Steph, or any other woman for that matter. But still.
27:22 Speaker 10 It's not just trans people. You know, when I think about the white cisgender heterosexual man that plays a video game, his avatar is important to him as well.
27:31 Speaker 07 Remember Tony, Steph's brother, in his Blood Elf character? At the time of creating his Blood Elf, Tony wasn't looking for the same representation as Steph. He was just trying things out.
27:42 Speaker 09 He was this very sort of flamboyant villainous character that I would sort of play in. It was just a different side of me, I guess, in much the same way Steph was using it to, you know, try out identities and things. It was similar for me in that, you know, we grew up in a very conservative town in Ontario. And I had really learned, you know, you have to behave a certain way to fit in and you have to, you know, be masculine and not effeminate and you can't behave this way or whatever. But online, you could try whatever.
28:15 Speaker 07 Until recently, Tony identified as a straight man. However, in the past few years, his spouse, whom he met on Bird and Crusade, that same 2007 expansion of World of Warcraft, has come out as trans. Today, Tony identifies as being in a queer relationship.
28:45 Speaker 10 I think what games do of any kind, and especially video games, is that they force all of us to question who we are.
28:54 Speaker 07 Dr. Rivera again.
28:56 Speaker 10 In a particular way, those who grow up LGBTQ, by not really meeting the standard of what is considered, quote unquote, "normal," we grow up with this constant questioning. But that, in some ways, that can also be the thing that makes us versatile and flexible and creative in a way that frankly, sometimes people who are cisgender or heterosexual might be deprived of because there is the assumption of being the norm. When you're put into a virtual world and you're suddenly, in some ways, forced to inhabit an avatar that is a different race or a different gender, you become them in some way and they become you.
29:40 Speaker 10 It does suddenly allow you to question everything. And I do think that's a mindset that can benefit anybody.
29:49 Speaker 07 In 2020, Quantum Foundry, which is a game analytics consulting company, did a survey about character gender preferences. They found that 29% of male gamers prefer to play female characters. Only 9% of female gamers prefer to play male characters. The researchers suggest that one reason for this might be because men tend to be more harshly judged by society when they deviate from gender norms. For someone who wants to explore another side of their identity, a virtual world, like a video game, can be an anonymous and safe way to do so.
30:25 Speaker 06 Everybody has an identity. Everybody has a gender identity, frankly. You know, but everybody has an identity beyond that, too. And there's lots of people that live every day in fear of stepping into who they want to be because they think that they shouldn't or they can't. I think that ideally, we get to a place where all of us can pursue our identity in a way that's healthy and kind and that isn't limited by these restraints that are in our head, that are placed there by culture when we're so young. Like, we don't need to be restrained by that. Video games are one place to explore that.
31:07 Speaker 07 That episode came from Franny Monahan. Our next episode in Hidden Levels, our series with 99% Invisible, is coming right up. It's about how the video game world has changed the world of cinema. Take a listen. Bye.
31:26 Speaker 00 Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. How should employers measure real skills in the age of AI?
31:38 Speaker 11 Instead of observing the final artifact, instead of observing the final essay or the final program, observe the entire process of creation.
31:47 Speaker 00 Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts and stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview of a recent episode on rethinking academic and job assessment when AI can do the work.
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33:02 Amory Sivertson? This episode was written and produced by Franny Monahan. It was edited by Meg Cramer, mix and sound design by our production manager, Paul Vikes, who also wrote a bunch of the original music for the series, and our theme music was composed by Swan Royale and Paul Vikes. Shout out to Hidden Levels managing producer Chris Berube for his input on this episode.
33:21 Ben Brock Johnson? The rest of our team at Endless Thread is Grace Tatter, Dean Russell, Amory Sivertson, myself, managing producer Sumit Tijoshi, and Emily Jankowski.
33:30 Amory Sivertson? Hidden Levels is our series, co-produced with 99% Invisible, about how the video game world has changed the world beyond video games. Jump over to that feed or keep listening right here to go to the next level.
33:42 Ben Brock Johnson? Endless Thread is a podcast about the blurred lines between the bread squad and real life. Have an online mystery, untold history, or other wild story from the internet you want us to tell? You can hit us up. Email us at [email protected] .
34:14 Speaker 00 Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Queston School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Janet Kang, Executive Director of the Just Horizons Alliance, on who stands to benefit from AI in education.
34:36 Speaker 12 I am absolutely in favor of AI in learning in the right context.
34:41 Speaker 08 And just to explain why you're excited about it.
34:43 Speaker 12 Oh, my gosh, individualized support, right? Personalization and to be able to scale quality education in places where it was historically impossible. So for certain kinds of learners with different kinds of learning styles and disabilities, for example, speakers of different languages, there are amazing ways AI can boost learning. It just has to be with the right context. And age appropriateness is something we do a lot of work in because it is very different depending on where in that maturity cycle you are in terms of how your brain develops.
35:14 Speaker 00 Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business Markets and Society at ibms.bu.edu.
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Previous Hidden Levels Ep. 3: This Game Wants YOU Next Hidden Levels Ep. 4: Machinima Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated